Had a chance to kayak in Antarctica recently……
My day job involves working for the Royal Navy and as I came to the end of 3 years onboard HMS ENDURANCE the idea of a kayaking expedition in Antarctica couldn’t be ignored. ENDURANCE is the RNs ice patrol vessel and spends the austral summer between the Falklands, South Georgia and Antarctica. Therefore having spent Christmas day 2005 kayaking in South Georgia and the various other places we visited that year we managed to persuade the Captain to let us come back the following season and use the ship as a base for a proper expedition. EndurancEKayak 66 South was born! Luckily for us, Mike Devlin happened to be onboard working with the British Schools Exploring Society and for those of you who don’t know him look at the front pages of the BCU coaching handbook. He is a well experienced Sea Kayaker so didn’t need much persuading and soon had a training program in place for us and was instrumental to us developing the kayaking skills required. We had plenty of cold weather, expedition experience and local knowledge but only a few of us had more than a couple of Sea Kayaking trips. To increase the teams capabilities we planned several events, one of which was to the West Coast of Scotland and as we paddled past Eigg we had no idea that 6 months later we would also paddle past another Egg in another place. P&H we also pretty instrumental as when we approached Bob Campbell (Marketing Director) for some Sea Kayaks and he came up trumps. Hopefully the photos show how happy we were!
Even though the composite kayaks were undoubtably better, the plastic capellas proved amazingly robust. We needed to hull repair each of the 3 composite boats but only 2 minor repairs (to a seat and a foot rest) were required to the plastic ones.
